Micron RealSSD P400m Enterprise SSD Review

Article Index

Test Setup, IOMeter 1.1 RC

Our Test Methodologies:Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a standard spinning hard disk for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest UEFI available as of press time and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled. The SSDs were secure erased before testing and left blank without partitions wherever possible, unless a test required them to be partitioned and formatted, as was the case with our ATTO, PCMark 7, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, and waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our actual results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance for the average end user. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

All of the drives offered consistent performance in the 4K random write test, with the Micron P400m finishing between the Intel and OCZ drives. Samsung's latest enterprise SSD, however, pulled way ahead (review forthcoming). In our custom workstation test, the Intel drive jumps out to a big lead. Note that the Micron drive offers consistent, predicable performance regardless of the queue depth tested.

In terms of bandwidth with the two access patters we tested in IOMeter, the Intel and Samsung drives lead the other drives and trade victories. The P400m is able to outpace the OCZ Vector in the 4K test though, and just misses catching the Intel DC S3700.